The Divine Collaborators

CHAPTER I

The Rainbow Bridge

Even those who have only a smattering of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy know that they aim at these three signal achievements: (I) ascent of the consciousness of man from mind to Supermind, which is the Truth-consciousness, the Rita-chit of the Veda; (2) descent of the Supermind into Matter and the conversion and transformation of the integral nature of man—physical, vital and mental—by the Light-Force of the Supermind, and (3) the perfect manifestation of Sachchidananda on earth through the transformed and divinised human nature. Sri Aurobindo does not subscribe to the world-shunning asceticism of the old schools of spiritual discipline, nor does he advocate the hedonistic enjoyment of life lived in the Ignorance and in the trailing turmoil of the dualities. His message is of the essential divinity of man and the inevitable fullness and perfection of its self-expression in life, on this earth and in the human body. He does not regard a union with God or Brahman only in the depths or on the heights of the being as a complete union. Man's birth-right, he affirms, is a constant, dynamic, integral union—a union in the nature as well as in the soul, in every little movement of life as well as in the stirless silence of ecstatic contemplation.

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Life must become a sparkling flood of Light and its jarring discords pass into the inalienable harmony of the supramental consciousness reigning over earth.

It goes without saying that this triple aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy is a revolutionary departure and is absolutely original to his spiritual genius. There is no precedent or parallel to it in the annals of spirituality, oriental or occidental, ancient or modem. It is true that in the Veda we meet with some references to the Rita-Chit or the supermind. It is described there as the Truth, the Right, the Vast; as the supreme step of Vishnu; and some Vedic Rishis endeavoured to rise into its solar glory. But there is no trace of a collective ascent into it or of any attempt on their part to bring it down into the material life for a conversion of the earth-consciousness. It was even held by some Rishis that it was not possible to pass through the gates of the Sun, i.e. the Supermind, and yet retain the human body. The Upanishadic Rishis knew of the existence of this supreme Truth-consciousness, which they called the Vijnana, but the Vedic urge towards it was no longer there in its ancient intensity and amplitude. However that may be, it was Sri Aurobindo who first fixed upon the creative Supermind as the goal of human evolution and laboured to call down and canalise its all-achieving Force for the birth of a new race of humanity, the race of gnostic supermen. This new birth will be an emergence of man, as the culmination of his evolutionary progression, into the supreme Truth-Consciousness, which will admit of a simultaneous

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realisation of and union with the transcendent Sachchidananda and His universal Immanence—a consummation not yet achieved by man. But in order that this emergence may be complete and securely established on earth, it is essential, as a pre-condition, that Matter should be transmuted into the luminous substance of the divine existence from which it is derived, and that the physical nature of man should, in consequence, be definitively freed from the dark density, inertia and insensibility which are its heritage from its inconscient origin. Physical transformation by means of the authentic supramental Force is, therefore, the crux of the mission of Sri Aurobindo's life, and it presages a future for humanity which is too glorious even for the widest and keenest mind of the modern man to conceive.

This sublime ideal and a definite spiritual guidance to realise it and make it a concrete experience and an abiding base of all life's activities and achievements, are the special gift of Sri Aurobindo to man. But it is very interesting that the same ideal had been the shaping truth and realising force in the Mother's life even when she was in France and knowing absolutely nothing of Sri Aurobindo and bis thoughts. Conscious of the great mission of her life from her very childhood and confirmed in her foreknowledge by certain remarkable visions and mystical experiences, she had been pursuing her spiritual life and steadily rising to her destined stature. Her "Prayers and Meditations", in which she has transcribed some of her experiences, bear surprising

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testimony to the essential identity which had existed between her ideal and that of Sri Aurobindo even before she met him in person on the 29th March, 1914. We cannot account for this identity by deriving it from the mystical traditions of the West, which do not seem to be aware of the Supermind or any such plane of creative Truth-consciousness, where man can have a perfect union, both in silence and in action, and a simultaneous self-identification with the Transcendent and the Immanent. The general trend of mystical thought in the West, in spite of the towering achievements of Ruysbroeck and St. Teresa, inclines towards a denial of the possibility of a complete and constant union with God in human fife. "Man shall not see my face and live" has been accepted more or less literally by almost all the leading Western mystics. St. Gregory the Great believes that "no one is able to fix the mind's eye on the unencompassed ray itself of Light." One can only "attain to somewhat of the unencompassed Light by stealth and scantily." St. Bernard agrees with St. Gregory that "those who by transport of contemplation are at times rapt in spirit, are able to taste some little fragment of the sweetness of supernal felicity," though rarely and momentarily. Couched in the same key, but weightier in authority, is St. Augustine's verdict, "Contemplation is only begun in this life, to be perfected in the next" (Tract, in loan, cxxiv. 5).

This, then, is the prevailing conception in the West of divine union or contemplation, though it is somewhat

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contradicted by the experiences of a few mystics here and there. Regarding the descent of the supernal Light and the consequent transformation of human nature, it has always been a doubtful and mystified issue. True it is that the Orphic Mysteries aimed at some kind of trans-formation or deification, but what they meant by trans-formation and how they proposed actually to achieve it has been a lost science, having had little bearing on the life of the subsequent Western mystics. Besides, the question of the manifestation of God in Matter has hardly ever seriously exercised the thought of Western mysticism. That the physical nature of man, which has its roots in the murky depths of the Inconscient and most of its motive forces in the obscure welter of the Subconscient, can be, not only purified, but completely converted and trans-muted into the divine Nature, is a possibility unexplored even by the greatest mystics of the West.

In the absence of any such tradition in the West from which the Mother might have imbibed the main strands of her manifestational and life-transfiguring mysticism, and in view of her later domicile in India and self-identification with Sri Aurobindo's life-work, we think we are justified in regarding her spiritual development in the West as a prelude to and a preparation for her work in India, which is a work for the whole of humanity, and seeing in the identity between her ideal and that of Sri Aurobindo an evidence of the decree of God that East and West must meet as Shiva and Shakti, self-manifesting Light and realising and transforming Force, to raise man

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from mind to supermind and convert his life of division and discord into the creative unity and blissful harmony of the Life Divine.

The "Prayers and Meditations of the Mother" begins from November 2, 1912 and ends on October 23, 1937. Out of a total of over 350 there are only six Prayers from 1919 to 1937, the rest all ranging from 1912 to 1918. Here we shall confine ourselves only to the Prayers written between 1912 and March 28, 19141—about 97 Prayers, which bear eloquent testimony to the great ideal which was defining itself more and more clearly and pressing forward towards self-realisation in the Mother. We shall also draw upon some of her youthful writings in the form of discourses, delivered before select audiences in France, to substantiate our thesis that the identity between the ideal of the Mother's life and that of Sri Aurobindo's, even when they did not know each other on the physical plane, was not a chance coincidence, but a decree and dispensation of Providence for the great work of the future. To say that their souls are complementary to each other, that is, each filling up what lacks in the other, as some people have suggested, is not true; for, a searching perusal of their respective thoughts before their meeting on the physical plane does not bear it out. The Mother's mission is so definitely outlined in the Prayers of between 1912 and 1914 that it betrays no trace of an incompleteness

¹ The Mother met Sri Aurobindo on the 29th March, 1914, as said above.

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or a wide gap anywhere to be filled up in the future; and Sri Aurobindo's thoughts and ideals are blazoned even in his earliest utterances and writings,—in his voluminous prose writings and, particularly in his poems,—so that there is no room for any doubt as to what he regarded as his fife's work. To say that Sri Aurobindo represents the static aspect of the Divine and the Mother the dynamic, is again not true; for the pulsing heart of their teachings is the divine dynamism, which they have both been labouring to instil into the earth-life. To call Sri Aurobindo static is to miss the very significance and the central, distinctive truth of his life and ideal. And that there is not only dynamism, but an untrembling status of eternal peace and repose in the Mother, will be amply proved by the Prayers we shall quote in the course of this essay. The truth of the matter is that the identity of their ideal was a natural flowering of the identity of their beings, and that their meeting from the two hemispheres was neither a chance nor a conjunction of complementaries, but a providential reunion of identities, separated for a time for the exigencies of the evolutionary terrestrial existence.

It is true that there are certain Prayers in the "Prayers and Meditations", particularly those written immediately after the Mother's meeting with Sri Aurobindo, in which she speaks of all her inner constructions having vanished like a vain dream and herself left before the immensity of the divine "without any frame or system, like a being not yet individualised." That a great change did take place in her, a marvellous new birth, as a result of her

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very first contact with Sri Aurobindo, is clearly recorded in the Prayers and Meditations; but it was a change in the methods and processes of her spiritual self-discipline and a new birth of her instrumental being, or more accurately perhaps, a re-affirmation, a re-foundation, abinitio of what was already achieved. "All the past, in its external form, appears to me ridiculous and arbitrary, and yet I know that it was useful in its time." Describing this state in another Prayer (dated April 3, 1914), the Mother says, "It is as if I was stripped of all my past, of my errors as well as my conquests, as if all that had disappeared to give place to one new-bom whose whole existence has yet to take shape, who has no Karma, no experience it can profit by, but no error either which it must repair... I know that I must now definitively give myself up and be like a page absolutely blank on which Thy thought, Thy Will, O Lord, will be able to inscribe themselves freely, secure against any deformation." It was, indeed, a monumental revolution, a massive whirlwind preparation that took place in her; and as a result of it, a flood of new experiences came, tending to complete the divine union she had been longing for and clinching the role she was to play in the work of the creation of a supramental race of men initiated by Sri Aurobindo.

"The 'I' has disappeared, there is only a docile instrument put at thy service, a centre of concentration and manifestation of Thy infinite and eternal rays; Thou hast taken my life and made it Thine; Thou hast taken my will and united it to Thine; Thou hast taken my love

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and identified it with Thine; Thou hast taken my thought and replaced it by Thy absolute Consciousness". (April 10, 1914). But whatever the nature and magnitude of the change, the ideal and mission of her life, as outlined in the enlarging prescience of her early years, remained essentially the same. That these modifications and even radical reversals in the methods of her self-culture did not occur only once is attested by the Mother's Prayer of October 7, 1913, about six months before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo:

"A new door has opened in my being and an immensity has appeared before me...

"All is changed, all is new; the old garbs have dropped and the new-bom child half-opens its eyes to the light of the dawn."

And there are not a few subsequent Prayers depicting Remarkable transitions and new conquests. The Mother's sadhana has followed strange curves of ascent and descent, for it has not been so much an individual as a collective sadhana for the conversion of the earth-consciousness and the supramental self-expression of God in man. It would, therefore, be a great mistake to try to assess and understand it by the usual criteria of the mystical life. Many of her experiences are a prism or a reflex of the experiences of the earth-soul, and by far the majority a mighty prelude and preparation and prognosis. Hers has been a consecrated life of collective

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conquests, and it is only when the curves of her work come full circle that the veil will be lifted from the true nature of her experiences and an illumined elite of humanity or superhumanity will be able to comprehend something of the significance of her ideal and mission. For the moment it remains an impenetrable mystery pregnant with incalculable possibilities for the future of humanity—a mystery, which repels the advances of the prying analytical reason, but welcomes faith into its sacred heart and vouchsafes to it a revealing glimpse of its hidden secret.

Let us now proceed to a close and devoted study of the words written or spoken by the Mother before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo, and try to see how they are essentially identical with those of Sri Aurobindo. We shall study them under four heads: (I) The Divine Union, (2) Physical transformation through service in an integral surrender, (3) conquest of the Subconscient and the Inconscient, (4) The Divine Manifestation and the Divine Life. It will be our humble endeavour in this study to follow the developing contours of the Mother's ideal and mission and relate them to those of Sri Aurobindo in order to substantiate our thesis that the meeting of the two identities from the two hemispheres of the world betokens the advent of the unity of mankind in the integral realisation and manifestation of the Divine in life.

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